Holmes contra Holmes

I don’t mind that Guy Ritchie seems to have turned Sherlock Holmes into an action figure since Arthur Conan Doyle regularly implied that Holmes was in fact an action figure.

Saving Avatar for New Year’s Day and taking Pop Mannion to Sherlock Holmes this afternoon---Mom Mannion will be using the opportunity to rest up from all her Mother Christmasing over the last few days.

Is any fan’s ideal Sherlock Holmes the character as Conan Doyle wrote him or as Sidney Paget drew him?  Pop Mannion’s Sherlock Holmes was Basil Rathbone.  Mine is Jeremy Brett.  But Brett taught both of us that there is no one way to play Holmes, although having seen and enjoyed The Seven Per-Cent Solution I’m not sure it’s a lesson I hadn’t already learned from Nicol Williamson, who come to think about it played Holmes as a bit of an action figure himself.

For the most part his Holmes was a strung-out, drug-addled, hyper-neurotic  Freudian case study, but then there was that sword fight on the top of the cars of a speeding train. And I don’t remember thinking that was out of character for Holmes.

That’s because Doyle’s Holmes probably could fence.  Why not?  He was a crack shot.  He could box.  He was strong, as strong as Downey appears to be playing him in the movie.  Take this scene from The Speckled Band in which the villain shows up at 221B Baker Street to try to scare Holmes off the case:

"I will go when I have said my say. Don't you dare to meddle with my affairs. I know that Miss Stoner has been here. I traced her! I am a dangerous man to fall foul of! See here." He stepped swiftly forward, seized the poker, and bent it into a curve with his huge brown hands.

"See that you keep yourself out of my grip," he snarled, and hurling the twisted poker into the fireplace he strode out of the room.

"He seems a very amiable person," said Holmes, laughing. "I am not quite so bulky, but if he had remained I might have shown him that my grip was not much more feeble than his own." As he spoke he picked up the steel poker and, with a sudden effort, straightened it out again.

It’s true Doyle rarely showed Holmes in situations that required him to duke or shoot it out with a bad guy.  Rarely.  And, remember, Doyle only showed Holmes as Watson saw him, and Watson was not the constant companion that popular imagination has him.  Watson and Holmes shared rooms on Baker Street, but not a room.  Watson spent his days at his surgery.  Then he got married and moved out.  He moved back in after Doyle widowed him but the Watsons were married for a while and during that while Holmes and Watson saw each other only on occasion.  When they got together, Holmes usually hinted at three or four cases he had solved in the meantime without Watson’s aid and advice.  And those cases often sounded more romantic and dangerous than any of the ones that became the basis for Watson’s stories.

In fact, Holmes seemed to encourage Watson to write up those cases because they were less romantic and violent and then objected to the little bits of romance Watson worked into those.  Holmes wanted Watson to record and tout his methods of detection not his adventures while detecting.

"To the man who loves art for its own sake," remarked Sherlock Holmes, tossing aside the advertisement sheet of the Daily Telegraph, "it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived. It is pleasant to me to observe, Watson, that you have so far grasped this truth that in these little records of our cases which you have been good enough to draw up, and, I am bound to say, occasionally to embellish, you have given prominence not so much to the many causes celebres and sensational trials in which I have figured but rather to those incidents which may have been trivial in themselves, but which have given room for those faculties of deduction and of logical synthesis which I have made my special province."

"And yet," said I, smiling, "I cannot quite hold myself absolved from the charge of sensationalism which has been urged against my records."

"You have erred, perhaps," he observed, taking up a glowing cinder with the tongs and lighting with it the long cherry-wood pipe which was wont to replace his clay when he was in a disputatious rather than a meditative mood--"you have erred perhaps in attempting to put color and life into each of your statements instead of confining yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the thing."

We also know that Holmes had extensive connections among the denizens of London’s underworld and spent lots of time there, and not always because he was investigating a case.  Holmes led a double life and he enjoyed keeping the details from Watson.  He also seemed to think Watson wouldn’t be able to handle it if he did let him in on what he’d been up.

Then there were the years after Reichenbach Falls during which, Holmes wasn’t, as he says he’ll be doing at the end of The Seven Per-Cent Solution, spending his time on the stage passing as a concert violinist named Sigerson.

His smarter younger brother’s name, by the way.

I travelled for two years in Tibet, therefore, and amused myself by visiting Lhassa, and spending some days with the head lama. You may have read of the remarkable explorations of a Norwegian named Sigerson, but I am sure that it never occurred to you that you were receiving news of your friend. I then passed through Persia, looked in at Mecca, and paid a short but interesting visit to the Khalifa at Khartoum the results of which I have communicated to the Foreign Office.

I think I’d like to know what made that short visit to the Khalifa interesting.

As for the scenes in the trailer that show Holmes as a robust, randy, and somewhat kinky heterosexual, well, there isn’t anything in Doyle’s stories that insists definitively that he wasn’t.  Holmes is usually brusque to the point of rudeness with women who cross his path---upper class women, at any rate---and he leaves it to Watson to act the gentleman with them.  And he routinely drops remarks that are more than typically Victorian in their sexism.  They border on misogyny and shock Watson, who has a high regard for women in general and is regularly quite admiring of individuals---he makes a point of noting female clients’ intelligence, courage, and level-headedness.  Holmes talks as if he thinks all women are borderline hysterics.  Watson is always ready to assure his readers that no actual hysterics have ever showed up at Baker Street.

Of course, we know that Holmes knows that there is at least one woman who is not an hysteric.

The woman.

Irene Adler.

Who shows up in the very first story.

She is the only woman---the only person---who ever outwits Holmes and he likes that about her.  He likes her. He may love her.  It may be that every thing he says about women and the way he treats them, when on a case or considering taking a case, is defensive.  He is pushing back against any feelings that could cloud his thinking.  On a case, he needs to be cool-headed to the point of being a machine.  (It makes perfect sense that Spock is one of his descendents, a possibility that requires us to believe that Holmes married and reproduced.)  But it may also be that what we are hearing is the result of his comparing every woman who comes after to the woman.

Or to the women he knows from the opium dens and dive bars and---why not?---whorehouses he visits without Watson around to complain or fret or judge.

So it may be that Guy Ritchie has simply taken what’s implied is going on in the background of Conan Doyle’s stories and moved it to the foreground where Watson can see what his friend’s really been up to for once.

What I’m dreading is not what Ritchie might have done with or to the character.  I’m dreading what he might have done with the movie, which is to have made it into a big noisy mess.

But I’m also dreading one more thing.

Rachel McAdams in a corset, garter belt, and thigh highs.

I’ll tell you why when we get back.  Movie’s starting soon.  We’re off.  Catch you later.

___________________

Take a virtual tour of Holmes’ study at 221B Baker Street.

Comments

[Ron Rizzo]

Ol' Lancer:

I've been a fan of the Holmes-Watson duo for nearly a century (LOL), and your dad's right, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce were the perfect pair. But I then obtained the BBC series with Jeremy Brett, and was mightily impressed at their faithfulness to Doyle's version. Looking forward to the movie now.

BTW, your winter picture from last year (taken down the street at 10 in the ayem) graces my desktop to remind me why I live in Florida.

[Linkmeister]

"I’m also dreading one more thing.

Rachel McAdams in a corset, garter belt, and thigh highs."

I can guess why. It would cause you to break the Ninth Commandment.

[actor212]

I'm off to see it this evening, Lance. As a big Holmes fan...on a one day layover in London a few years back, I insisted on seeing 221B above any other landmark...I, too, anticipate this with some dread.

I'm torn between my favourite Holmes. Rathbone had the patrician know-it-all quality slightly better than Brett, but undoubtedly, Brett brought to the role an animalistic quality. Brett's Holmes could not have been anything but a detective, whereas Rathbone could easily have been a violinist, a dockworker, an actor.

I suspect some of this has to do with the cultural environment: Rathbone had to portray an almost-Superman Holmes because of the war, where Brett had the luxury of focusing on Holmes the enigma.

Holmes in Khartoum

[nothstine]

I remember from somewhere an interview in which Brett told [or perhaps recounted being told] the secret of playing Holmes: Most actors, he said, look for ways to reveal Holmes' inner workings--his secret desires, his unspoken longings, the childhood trauma that made him who and what he is. The trick is to understand that he doesn't have any. There's nothing inside. That's cold, but it sounds right to me: Like Hammett's Spade, we can know Holmes only from the outside in.

I think that's where the expansion of 'The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton' into the Brett story 'The Master Blackmailer' erred. It's not that invented elements in the plot arc of his [ahem] dysfunctional engagement to the housemaid are, strictly speaking, noncanonical. It's that they represent a rare [for that series] and unsuccessful attempt to get inside Holmes's head.

[mds]

Who shows up in the very first story.

Well, the very first short story. Both A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four predated "A Scandal in Bohemia."

(I love the smell of pointless pedantry in the morning.)

[M.A.Peel]

I enjoyed it, as a film I wanted to see on a big screen rather than at home. Two things. Downey should not have been cast in what will hopefully be a new franchise. I like the franchise idea, because it will hopefully lead new generations to discover the literature. The role should have gone to a Brit. End of story. But what makes it worse is that Downey is continuing as Tony Stark in Iron Man. I hate having the same actor in both.

Secondly: a stupid piece of dialogue given to Mary. Upon meeting Holmes she says something like, 'I've gotten a bunch of detective novels, Wilke Collins, Poe.' The idea of "detective novels" had certainly not yet codified in the 1880s, even though Poe had published "Murders in the Rue Morgue." It just wasn't a genre yet. Really took me out of the story for a minute.

[Tim S.]

Saw the movie and really enjoyed it. It plays more like "James Bond in Victorian England," though without the libido, contrary to your fears from the previews. The affection between Holmes and Watson is played up well, and Guy Ritchie proves again that he's one of the few directors who can actually handle an action movie that keeps people interested.

My big gripe with it was that I wanted Holmes to struggle more against the mystical element. A creature of logic, it should have bothered him more than it did, or at least he should have made a couple dismissive pronouncements about it (as I recall the literary Holmes doing about "vampires" in one story). He's secure in his logical world, yes, but it was specifically challenged.

Ah well. All in all, it delivered what it promised. I look forward to seeing your review of it!

[Lance]

Tim S., I expected Holmes to say something along those lines too. It's there, though, in Downey's attitude in the cemetery.

Mrs Peel, that bothered me too. Besides, who considers Collins a writer of detective novels as opposed to mysteries? And it wouldn't have been necessary if A. Ritchie hadn't decided for some reason that Watson hadn't written up any of the cases as stories yet or B.---and this bothered me more---Ritchie had let Mary be the Mary from The Sign of Four.

mds,

You're right. Those two novels came first. A Scandal in Bohemia, though, is the first story in the first collection, and I guess I assumed that everybody starts with The Adventures because that's where I did.

[Linkmeister]

"The Complete Sherlock Holmes" begins with the first two novels. Single-volume, contains everything. My copy is inscribed by my parents: Happy Birthday, 14-year-old!

[Ian Welsh]

I thought Downey did an acceptable job.

Very clearly the beginning of a franchise, assuming it does well enough at the box office, which I'm sure it will.

[actor212]

Tim, I took the Holmes logic v mysticism to be an in-character trait, that he was applying his own saw, and realized there was a perfectly logical explanation. I don't want to spoiler the movie, so I won't say more.

I thought the film was superb, altho like MA I had reservations about Downey (specifically after there was an IronMan trailer). Lance, that would make an interesting comparison: Tony Stark v Sherlock Holmes as visioned by Downey.

The Collins comment came as less of a shock to me because I assumed Mary was trying to shine up her creds with Holmes, and of course, set up his devastating construct of her physicality.

[KathyF]

You haven't seen it? I liked it, and I really hate action films. I didn't like the actress who played Irene Adler, though. But I thought the two lead characters were great.

My only problem was how they got from Parliament to Tower Bridge so quickly. And also the bits I couldn't watch, so had to put my hands over my eyes. That means I missed most of the last quarter of the film.

[Dead Man]

here's another interesting article on Sherlock Holmes

http://www.moneyteachers.org/Deadmanmusings11.htm

[professorKettlewell]

Ron Rizzo:
Sorry to nitpick, but that series was made by Granada (part of ITV) and not the BBC. It must have stung the BBC (and Thames TV!) like cleaning-fluid in the eyes that the definitive portrayal of one of THE quintessential London characters was pulled off by a bargain-basement light-ent station from Manchester.